a scientist with a chronic case of cinéphilia

Tag: terrence malick

Some movies are so defiantly opaque that one cannot help but marvel at the brazen display of pretension oozing through the screen. Jonathan Glazer’s “Under the Skin” is that type of picture. There is absolutely an audience for movies like this, but I was not impressed.

Scarlett Johansson signs up to be objectified. The first half involves her character seducing men in Scotland and luring them into a house where, once inside, it is pitch black and the unsuspecting prey is eventually swallowed by a calm liquid. We watch Johansson stripping off her clothes until she is down to her bra and panties, all the while retaining a blank look on her face. The second half is somewhat similar although the performer soon reveals her breasts and crotch. It is all supposed to be “artistic,” I guess.

The screenplay is insistent on not answering any nagging questions and so it fails to connect to the audience beyond sensory level. Why is Johansson’s character, who seems to be an extraterrestrial being, only targeting young white men? Who is “she” exactly and what is her purpose? What are the men used for? Food? Energy? Eventually, we are allowed to observe what happens underneath that mysterious liquid. However, it serves only to showcase visual effects that is not even all that striking.

There are three good scenes surrounded by close to worthless, deathly boring, lifeless expositions. The event that unfolds at a rocky beach, for instance, commands true suspense. The raw image of people being swallowed by increasingly strong and violent waves makes us wonder at which moment we will no longer see a person struggling. Second, the young man with a deformity offers a glimmer of true emotions in an otherwise emotionally static script. Lastly, the final scene in the woods shows how good the movie could have been if the writers, Walter Campbell and Glazer, had allowed us to empathize with the protagonist more often.

It takes great talent to turn style into substance. This is why names like Stanley Kubrick and Terrence Malick hold value to me and the name Glazer does not. In Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” while the ending sequence boggles the mind, at that point it requires that we be confused or not know how to respond exactly because the story takes a leap into the unknown. In “The Tree of Life,” the lyricism is welcoming and consistent. Although a sensory experience for the most part, we understand the core of its subjects.

“Under the Skin” is an art-house film with a small brain and even smaller ambitions. If Glazer’s intention were to create a picture for the sake of it existing, then congratulations. But let us not pretend that this is anything remotely original or, worse, attempting to set the standard for anything. It will not be remembered fondly twenty or thirty years from now. This I guarantee.

Fifteen-year-old Holly (Sissy Spacek) lives with her father (Warren Oates) in South Dakota and the family of two lead a typical 1950s suburban existence. Kit (Martin Sheen), a garbageman, notices Holly from a distance and approaches her. Despite being ten years her senior, she welcomes the flirtation because the attention, potentially a romantic one, excites her. Spending time with Kit feels fresh and exciting because it means distance from books, boredom, and a father who does not seem to pay much attention to her. Eventually, Kit and Holly, convinced that they are in love, hit the road. As they head toward the badlands of Montana, they leave corpses in their wake.

“Badlands,” written and directed by Terrence Malick, tells the lovers’ romance not through a typical character arc but through the lands they touch and interact with. The film begins in a lively suburb with people in the streets as they converse, play, and buy groceries–typical as can be–and it ends in a barren terrain of rock and sandy dryness where not a soul can be seen for miles.

The narration is effectively executed. Since it is not shown that the couple engages in meaningful conversations other than superficial proclamations that they care for one another, Holly’s words via narration, almost in a state of daydream, make us aware that she has real thoughts about a lifestyle of constantly being uprooted because she and Kit are on the run from the law. Even though she rarely shows it, perhaps because of an unrealized fear toward her partner in crime, she feels some guilt toward the people they come across, most of which die for no good reason other than for a rush of adrenaline.

Her guilt and disapproval of Kit’s methods are expressed when she tells him that he is one of the most trigger-happy persons she has ever met. Because the story moves at a purposeful slow pace, we are given time to wonder whether Kit, when shooting his gun, imagines pointing his weapon at empty tin cans instead of something that has consciousness and feels pain. He often expresses an immediate ecstasy when the trigger is pressed and the bullet is released just as a tyro shooter would in a shooting range.

The film bestows many memorable images for those willing to look hard enough. As much as I was tickled from watching Kit stepping on a diseased, or possibly deceased, cow or the way he wraps his arms around a shotgun as he stares at the distant lonely moon amidst a refulgent sky, I adored the scenes when Kit just looks at his girl with complete contentment. His happiness may not always be congruent to his girl’s peace of mind, but we get the feeling that he will do anything to protect and provide for her.

Injecting genuine humanity in killer is a big risk and is not always done right. Here, since the writer-director is adamant about not judging his characters through hackneyed plot devices like karma or unexpected twists, almost everything works.

Inspired by the real-life murder spree committed by Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, “Badlands” is akin to watching a poem unfold with magic embedded in small moments. It finds honesty in the tragic disillusionment of young love.

As a director I admire for taking his time to really helm a picture and consistently push the boundaries of what the cinematic medium can bring to us, it is most disappointing that Terrence Malick’s “To the Wonder” does not offer anything refreshing or new. It is closest to “The Tree of Life” in style but, as a whole, it comes off excruciatingly dull, almost as if the writer-director’s name is slapped onto the end credits but is actually made by an ardent but ultimately talentless impostor.

The figures on screen talk in a whispery, raspy tone to the point where it is so unnatural, clearly they are trying too hard to sound thought-provoking. Couple their bits of dialogue with would-be contemplative classical music and occasional utilization of narration to add a glimmer of context, the work ends up artificial, too controlled for what should be an enveloping experience of how it is like to be so wrapped up in being romantically involved with another. I did not feel for any of the models on screen.

Though negligible, the basic premise is this: Neil (Ben Affleck) and Marina (Olga Kurylenko) meet in Paris and move to Oklahoma. When Marina’s visa expires, she is forced to leave the country. While Marina is overseas, Neil reconnects with a woman in his past, Jane (Rachel McAdams), whose farm is on the verge of bankruptcy. To its credit, while the set-up sounds like a sort of a love triangle, it is not.

It is not the actors’ fault that the material is so dry. The screenplay is so self-indulgent, it leaves very little wiggle room for the performers to interpret their characters in meaningful ways. I wondered why they were cast in the first place. Get an unknown face to play Affleck’s role and it would not have made a significant difference.

Many images are recycled from past Malick pictures. There is a recurring theme involving water, which symbolizes life and sustenance (in this case, of a relationship), in which similar figures, including angling and duration, can be seen in “The Tree of Life” and “The New World”–characters step in the water and their sense of being is renewed. Another involves people running or walking through wheat fields and grass, summoning “Days of Heaven” and “The Thin Red Line.” These are symbols of freedom, an out of body experience, and being one with nature–living things that grow directly because of the sun.

In addition, the images are repetitive. How many times must we endure looking at a man and a woman kissing, caressing, and holding hands? They are shot so slowly that it borders on fetishistic. For the lack of a better term, I found the whole thing to be sickening. Since the subject of marriage is brought up, especially from the standpoint of religion, I felt as though the writer-director has created a work with an underlying message: that in the eyes of God marriage is strictly between a man and a woman.

“To the Wonder” is suffocatingly, maddeningly esoteric. It will test anyone’s patience. There are beautiful people on screen but close to nothing is communicated. Actually, what I got from this film is less than nothing. It stole two hours of my life. And that is something I would never have imagined saying about a Malick film.

Bill (Richard Gere), a steelworker, killed his boss during a physical altercation at work. Fearing what he had just done, he took Linda (Linda Manz), his sister, and Abby (Brooke Adams), his girlfriend, out of the city to the country where they worked for a wealthy farmer (Sam Shepard). Bill and Abby pretended to be siblings in order to evade the police. It seemed to work. But while on the ranch, Bill took notice of the farmer’s attraction to Abby so he convinced his girlfriend to marry the other man for his fortune. After all, he was terminally ill and it was only a matter of time until he died. But once the two were married, the farmer’s health seemed better than ever. Written and directed by Terrence Malick, “Days of Heaven” was shot beautifully. The landscape of endless yellow wheat in contrast to the majestic blue sky and the hardworking men and women on the foreground was breathtaking. By looking at the images, it made me feel small. It was a reminder of how blind we can become to the most seemingly simple imagery that nature offers. However, the director’s focus on the images cost the picture in terms of characterization. Bill and Abby were supposed to be in love, but I didn’t feel any passion between them. What did he see in her and, more importantly, what did she see in him? It was tantamount that we felt their chemistry because the plot was driven by the push and pull between romance and survival. But since there was no great tension between the lovers, when Bill looked at Abby and the farmer enjoying themselves from a distance, he looked sad for no good reason. I felt he deserved to feel like he got the short end of the stick because it was his idea to cheat another man off his fortune. He used the girl so he could escape being poor. He was not a likable man, which was fine, but I struggled to see why it was worth following his story. I was actually more interested in the farmer and his relationship with the farm foreman (Robert J. Wilke). The foreman felt the need to protect the man he considered his son from the likes of conniving Bill and Abby. Unfortunately, he was only in from of the camera for a total of about ten minutes. He wasn’t given very much to do other than to give Bill knowing looks. As for the swarm of locusts that invaded the farm toward the end of the picture, though a sight to behold, the symbolism felt heavy-handed. When the bugs arrived, I knew exactly where the story was heading. It was only a matter of time until the farmer learned the truth and confronted Bill of his transgressions. I didn’t mind the picture’s slow pace because it had reason to be slow. Bill, Linda, and Abby were not used to living a life feeling like they had it all: the expensive wine, the nice clothes, and not having to work. They were relatively happy for a period of time and the slow pace showed how they relished that life comfortable plateau. I actually wanted the film to have a healthier running time. If such were the case, perhaps there would have been more room for us to get to know the characters beyond the surface level. “Days of Heaven” worked as a moving painting bathed in glorious natural light but not as a love triangle. The material left me with a drought of complex human drama. I actually found myself turning to Ennio Morricone’s sensitive and melancholy score because I wanted to feel something so badly.

Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt) and Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) received a phone call informing them that one of their three sons, Jack (Hunter McCracken), R.L. (Laramie Eppler), and Steve (Tye Sheridan), had died. We knew it wasn’t Jack because we came to meet him as an adult (Sean Penn), still struggling with the death of his brothers, the other passed away at the age of nineteen. The writer-director, Terrence Malick, spent the rest of the film painting us a picture of the boys’ childhood, torn between nature and grace which their father and mother embodied, respectively. To criticize this movie as having a weak plot is tantamount to saying that an abstract painting is bad because one does not approve of the artist’s use of color since it makes the painting look unrealistic. In a few instances, such as the case here, plot is negligible. Personally, it was about the images and how they were utilized to remind myself of my childhood. It was set in 1950s American suburbia; I was raised in the 1990s Philippine urban-suburban neighborhood. The two are separated by place and time but I saw myself in these kids. It reminded me of times when I ran around with my cousins playing kickball, egos bruised for every lost point; the joy of collecting caterpillars, grasshoppers, spiders, lizards, stray cats at a nearby ice plant, which children of the neighborhood likened to believe was abandoned so we could call it our own turf; the way mother would yell for me and brother, beckoning us to come in for dinner, chastising us when we were too grimy as we approached the table, and making us clean up a bit before experiencing the comfort of a warm home-cooked meal. It also reminded me of the things I didn’t have. Father was in America making a living for his family, so no one taught me how to put up my fist properly and fight. First fight at school gets bloody awful quick when you don’t know how to defend yourself. But sooner or later you learn to get tougher. You find ways as Jack did with his brother, not because he was bully or meaning to be unkind, but because he needed to find a sparring partner, someone who he believed was his equal. The most moving scene for me was when Jack, after shooting a rubber bullet at R.L.’s index finger, summoned the courage within himself to apologize to his brother without anyone telling him to do so. It was such a tender moment because apologizing and, more importantly, actually meaning it can be very difficult to do. I admired Malick’s use of contrast. He featured an extended sequence starting from The Big Bang up until the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction. In one of the scenes, a carnivorous dinosaur spotted a fatally wounded dinosaur resting on the rocks. The healthy one approached the dying carefully, making sure that there was no immediate threat in the vicinity. Just when I thought it was going to go for the kill, I saw a human aspect in something so beastly: the healthy one covered the wounded’s face with its foot, hesitated against its nature, and walked away. The scene was loyal to the film’s theme: nature versus grace. “The Tree of Life” is a torrent of epic memories, bound to move those in touch with their wonderful, tragic, magical childhood. It’s one of those movies I won’t forget because, in a way, I’ve lived it.

English settlers landed on Louisiana in 1607. Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) was to be hanged, on the grounds of mutiny, the moment they reached land. But Captain Newport (Christopher Plummer) changed his orders because he knew Captain Smith was a good explorer. He just needed to be controlled. When Captain Smith met Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher), daughter of an Indian leader, the two began a forbidden love affair. Written and directed by Terrence Malick, “The New World” moved at a deliberate slow pace in order to highlight man’s relationship with nature. It worked most of the time. I saw beauty in the way the director captured the wind caressing the grass, the way the characters leaned into the magnificent trees, and the elegant movement of the water as the ships heaved its way onto land. Pocahontas had two men in her life and the emotions were dealt with complexity. In the end, I was convinced she loved them both in different ways. When she was with Captain Smith, I noticed that they always looked into each other’s eyes. The way the camera lingered as the captain taught Pocahontas English words held a sweetness and innocence. As their bodies slowly inched closer to one another, we felt their concern that someone could be looking. There was an understated joy when they touched each other’s skin. When Pocahontas was with John Rolfe (Christian Bale), the two spent their time looking at a distance, as if transfixed at the sight of the future. But when they did look into each other’s eyes, they shared an outward passion whether it be in a hut or out in the garden. Through the men in her life, we saw the way she changed. She left her culture because she was a dreamer. But leaving didn’t mean forgetting. She was curious of the life outside of her sphere and she felt as though her sarcrifices were worth it. Like Captain Smith and John Rolfe, she was an explorer. But my favorite scene didn’t have anything to do with a shot involving a gorgeous scenery or her interactions with the two most important men in her life. It was when Pocahontas handed a homeless man a coin and gently touched his cheek. It held a great meaning for me because it was reassuring. Even though her style of clothing and the way in which she carried herself had changed, she was the same person we met in the beginning of the film. She was playful, compassionate, and connected with the Earth. It’s understandable when I hear people say that the film is just too slow for their liking. It wasn’t plot-driven. Most movies are but they don’t need to be. “The New World” was an exercise of the senses and, in my opinion, how we can relate our personal experiences with it. As an immigrant, scenes like Pocahontas smelling a book because she had never seen one before had meaning for me. I grew up in the Philippines not having a computer in my home. When I moved to America, I didn’t know how to type on the keyboard or even use the mouse to click at an icon to go to the internet. In small ways, I saw myself in Pocahontas. Sometimes small is enough.

An AWOL soldier, Private Witt (James Caviezel), had never been good at following orders. When ordered to go left, he turned right. But when he was found in a Malaysian island by 1st Sgt. Edward Welsh (Sean Penn), Pvt. Witt, as punishment, was assigned to be a stretcher bearer in the Battle of Guadalcanal. The attack was led by Capt. James Staros (Elias Koteas) and his superior Lt. Col. Gordon Tall (Nick Nolte). The former wouldn’t obey the latter’s orders because he believed that sending his men forward was suicide. The Japanese bunkers were too far and too hidden for a typical affront. Lt. Col. Tall wasn’t convinced. Based on the autobiographical novel by James Jones and beautifully directed by Terrence Malick, “The Thin Red Line” was fascinating because it combined the horrors of war with spirituality. We were given the chance to hear a soldier’s thoughts, American and Japanese, about his place in the world, trepidation in terms of facing his mortality, and the loved ones he left behind. While the action scenes were raw and unflinching, I was most impressed with the way the soldiers played the hand they’ve been given. Some made rookie but dire mistakes out of panic (Woody Harrelson), some succumbed in fear and would rather be invisible (Adrien Brody), while others were distracted by flashbacks, wondering whether someone was still waiting for them at home (Ben Chaplin). The film highlighted that war was not as simple as two sides fighting for a cause. In a way, the battlefield was a glorious arena in which we had to fight ourselves. While good soldiers trusted their instincts, orders, too, must be obeyed. The conflict between instinct and duty could break a man. I was most interested in Pvt. Witt because he looked at his enemies with serenity. Unlike his comrades, not once did he show hatred toward the soldiers on the opposite side of the mountain. I wondered why. If I was in his position, I’m not quite sure if I could look at my enemies as if they were my equal. I would probably see them as lower animals and treat them as such. I just don’t think I can be as forgiving if I knew that my friends and comrades died because of them. Pvt. Witt mentioned that “maybe all men got one big soul everybody’s a part of, all faces are the same man.” Malick used images to underline man’s place in nature. There were zen-like shots of soldiers just sitting around and admiring, for example, a plant. It took them out of the situation, even for just a few seconds, until the voice of their leader urged them to go on. There were several shots of birds, flying in sky or dying on the ground, which symbolized either glory or pain. “The Thin Red Line” was sensitive and intelligent. It tried to find answers in a place where answers were as transient as they were permanent.

Mission Statement

• To provide an independent voice and communicate a strong passion for film.

• To establish a sense of what kind of movie you are about to see, what you should notice about it, and why you should care about it.

• To approach movies without cynicism or preconceived notion and evaluate each work based on what kind of movie it aspires to be.

• To champion the unseen, overlooked, forgotten, and under-appreciated movies.

People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don’t have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.

I’m as guilty as anyone, because I helped to herald the digital era with “Jurassic Park.” But the danger is that it can be abused to the point where nothing is eye-popping any more. The difference between making “Jaws” thirty-one years ago and “War of the Worlds” is that today, anything I can imagine, I can realize on film. Then, when my mechanical shark was being repaired and I had to shoot something, I had to make the water scary. I relied on the audience’s imagination, aided by where I put the camera. Today, it would be a digital shark. It would cost a hell of a lot more, but never break down. As a result, I probably would have used it four times as much, which would have made the film four times less scary. “Jaws” is scary because of what you don’t see, not because of what you do. We need to bring the audience back into partnership with storytelling.

I’ve discovered I’ve got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces.

Stanley Kubrick

If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.

I’ve always been interested in ESP and the paranormal. In addition to the scientific experiments which have been conducted suggesting that we are just short of conclusive proof of its existence, I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of opening a book at the exact page we’re looking for, or thinking of a friend a moment before they ring on the telephone. But “The Shining” didn’t originate from any particular desire to do a film about this. I thought it was one of the most ingenious and exciting stories of the genre I had read. It seemed to strike an extraordinary balance between the psychological and the supernatural in such a way as to lead you to think that the supernatural would eventually be explained by the psychological: “Jack must be imagining these things because he’s crazy.” This allowed you to suspend your doubt of the supernatural until you were so thoroughly into the story that you could accept it almost without noticing. The novel is by no means a serious literary work, but the plot is for the most part extremely well worked out, and for a film that is often all that really matters.

I do not always know what I want, but I do know what I don’t want.

Werner Herzog

What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.

It is not only my dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. The only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about… and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.

Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect.

Agnès Varda

I’m not interested in seeing a film just made by a woman—not unless she is looking for new images.

I’m interested in people who are not exactly the middle way, or who are trying something else because they cannot prevent themselves from being different, or they wish to be different, or they are different because society pushed them away.

In my films I always wanted to make people see deeply. I don’t want to show things, but to give people the desire to see.

Alfred Hitchcock

Four people are sitting around a table talking about baseball or whatever you like. Five minutes of it. Very dull. Suddenly, a bomb goes off. Blows the people to smithereens. What does the audience have? Ten seconds of shock. Now, take the same scene and tell the audience there is a bomb under that table and will go off in five minutes. The whole emotion of the audience is totally different because you’ve given them that information. In five minutes time that bomb will go off. Now the conversation about baseball becomes very vital. Because they’re saying to you, “Don’t be ridiculous. Stop talking about baseball. There’s a bomb under there.” You’ve got the audience working.

There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.

是枝 裕和 | Hirokazu Kore-eda

Yes, a family is interesting. You can get a lot of drama in the conflicts there. It’s like the sea. It seems calm, but inside there is conflict.

In the neighborhood around Waseda, there were all these movie theaters, so every morning I left the house and watched movies instead of going to class. The experience of encountering films then is one of my greatest memories. Before that I’d never paid any attention to directors, but there I was taking a crash course in Ozu, Kurosawa, Naruse, Truffaut, Renoir, Fellini. Because I’ve always been naturally a more introspective person, I was more interested in becoming a screenwriter than a director.

The Japanese don’t have a specific religion, but a spirituality. A cap, shoes, and a table have a spirituality. When you eat an apple, you don’t say you eat it: you say, “I am receiving it.” Kind of like you are thanking the food.

Ken Loach

Why do they say I hate my country? And what does that even mean? Am I supposed to hate my town, am I supposed to hate all English people, or my government? And if I do hate my government, does that mean I hate my country? It’s a democratic duty to criticize the government.

A movie isn’t a political movement, a party, or even an article. It’s just a film. At best it can add its voice to public outrage.

Ava DuVernay

Black people loving and losing is something we don’t see enough of. We’re always in these heightened situations like something big is happening, something funny or something violent. And you know what? Sometimes we die of breast cancer or a broken heart. Things happen that are just not being explored cinematically. It’s time we reinvigorated that type of film.

As a Black woman filmmaker I feel that’s my job: visibility. And my preference within that job is Black subjectivity. Meaning I’m interested in the lives of Black folk as the subject. Not the predicate, not the tangent. [These stories] deserve to be told. Not as sociology, not as spectacle, not as a singular event that happens every so often, but regularly and purposefully as truth and as art on an ongoing basis, as do the stories of all the women you love.

If you walk into a room, and there is no one that’s not like you there, whether it’s a woman or a person of color, anyone that’s different from you, you should be able to say, “This is a problem.” We need allies in that room to say [this] video, this room, this company, these ideas, this film, this whatever, this is not right—this is not good enough.

Luca Guadagnino

I’m one of those directors who read reviews, even if they’re bad, because I started as a film critic as a cinema student. I indulge in the art of criticism in general.

Making movies is about control. You need to control your narcissism in the first place, and you need to be disciplined enough to understand the reason for the film. You need to follow the agenda of the film, not a personal agenda or that of the studio. Or, worst of all, of the actors.

I was two years younger than Elio is in the book [“Call Me by Your Name”]. But I remember my childhood and adolescence distinctively, and how I was already starting to be a director, because I was sitting at the far end of a room studying people dancing at parties. I was reading books and imagining stories in my own mind and I was starting to become a young man aware of his own sexuality, although, unlike Elio, I did dare to speak [up about it].

In 1993, my first documentary was about the civil war in Algeria. That was in French and in Arabic. Another short film I did was silent. What I’m trying to say is that, yes, I’m Italian, and yes, I make films with Italian money, but personally, I’ve always been invested in the broader world of filmmaking.

Pedro Almodóvar

Yes, women are stronger than us. They face more directly the problems that confront them, and for that reason they are much more spectacular to talk about. I don’t know why I am more interested in women, because I don’t go to any psychiatrists, and I don’t want to know why.

I think decor says a lot about someone’s social position, their taste, their sensibility, their work, and also about the aesthetic way I have chosen to tell their story.

My school and the cinema were only a few buildings apart on the same street. The bad education I received at school was rectified when I went to the cinema. My religion became the cinema. Of course one could create one’s own belief system, and anything that helps or supports you in life can be seen as covering the function of religion. In that sense you could consider cinema my religion, because it is one of my major stimuli that I have for living. Cinema has that aspect of devotion to saints and idolatry as well. In that sense it is entirely religious.

Terrence Malick

Experience it like a walk in the countryside. You’ll probably be bored or have other things in mind, but perhaps you will be struck, suddenly, by a feeling, by an act, by a unique portrait of nature.

David Fincher

My idea of professionalism is probably a lot of people’s idea of obsessive.

People will say, “There are a million ways to shoot a scene,” but I don’t think so. I think there are two, maybe. And the other one is wrong.

Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine. Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything’s okay. I don’t make those kinds of movies. That, to me, is a lie. Everything’s not okay.

Louis Malle

You must find the note, the correct key, for your story. If you find it, everything will work. If you do not, everything will stick out like elbows.

I think predictability has become the rule and I’m completely the opposite–I like spectators to be disturbed.

Martin Scorsese

When I did “The Age of Innocence,” the critics said, “Is it wrong to expect a little more heat from Scorsese?” I thought “The Age of Innocence” was pretty hot. So I said, “Alright, I’ll do ‘Casino,'” and they said, “Well, gee, it’s the same as ‘Goodfellas.'” You can’t win. Yes, “Casino” has the style of “GoodFellas,” but it has more to do with America–and even Hollywood: the idea of never being satisfied.

“L’avventura” gave me one of the most profound shocks I’ve ever had at the movies, greater even than “Breathless” or “Hiroshima, mon amour.” Or “La dolce vita”. At the time there were two camps, the people who liked the Fellini film and the ones who liked “L’avventura.” I knew I was firmly on Antonioni’s side of the line, but if you’d asked me at the time, I’m not sure I would have been able to explain why. I loved Fellini’s pictures and I admired “La dolce vita,” but I was challenged by “L’avventura.” Fellini’s film moved me and entertained me, but Antonioni’s film changed my perception of cinema, and the world around me, and made both seem limitless. I was mesmerized by “L’avventura” and by Antonioni’s subsequent films, and it was the fact that they were unresolved in any conventional sense that kept drawing me back. They posed mysteries–or, rather, the mystery of who we are, what we are, to each other, to ourselves, to time. You could say that Antonioni was looking directly at the mysteries of the soul.

The cinema began with a passionate, physical relationship between celluloid and the artists and craftsmen and technicians who handled it, manipulated it, and came to know it the way a lover comes to know every inch of the body of the beloved. No matter where the cinema goes, we cannot afford to lose sight of its beginnings.

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

In “L’enfant,” we have a main character, Bruno, a man who cannot be a father, who is never able to be a father, and it feels like at the end of the movie he at last became a father. Well, I’m not sure things will be OK afterwards. But it seems like when they’re in the prison, where people can speak with their families, I think he says, “How’s Jimmy, how is he doing?” Well, he never said the name of the kid before. It means that he has changed. Because of the kid that he has saved from the water, Steve, he became someone else. It takes time. So we felt that it was the right moment to end the movie. Our movies are like portraits.

We haven’t found any place or room for music in our movies. Maybe because we are not able to find the right music, I don’t know. And when we’re shooting, I think that’s where things happen actually. When we’re building our plans, et cetera, the rhythm of that construction is partly based on the sounds, not only the dialogues, but touching the objects. And rhythm is based on the sounds that we can hear on the set, the noise of the bodies moving, the breathing of the characters, that’s our music. We just don’t see the need for music. When we’re shooting we just don’t think about it.

I think one of the big wishes of the human kind is to transform things, to work on things to construct, to destroy, to sometimes construct again. And not only to look at the world, let’s say, passively. I think that’s the aim of humankind, being a man, a woman, is to change things. And cinema is about showing things that are changing.

Spike Lee

I think it is very important that films make people look at what they’ve forgotten.

I’m just trying to tell a good story and make thought-provoking, entertaining films. I just try and draw upon the great culture we have as a people, from music, novels, the streets.

I believe in destiny. But I also believe that you can’t just sit back and let destiny happen. A lot of times, an opportunity might fall into your lap, but you have to be ready for that opportunity. You can’t sit there waiting on it. A lot of times you are going to have to get out there and make it happen.

宮崎 駿 | Hayao Miyazaki

I would like to make a film to tell children, “It’s good to be alive.”

I’ve become skeptical of the unwritten rule that just because a boy and girl appear in the same feature, a romance must ensue. Rather, I want to portray a slightly different relationship, one where the two mutually inspire each other to live–if I’m able to, then perhaps I’ll be closer to portraying a true expression of love.

Personally, I was never more passionate about manga than when preparing for my college entrance exams. It’s a period of life when young people appear to have a great deal of freedom, but are in many ways actually oppressed. Just when they find themselves powerfully attracted to members of opposite sex, they have to really crack the books. To escape from this depressing situation, they often find themselves wishing they could live in a world of their own–a world they can say is truly theirs, a world unknown even to their parents. To young people, anime is something they incorporate into this private world. I often refer to this feeling as one yearning for a lost world. It’s a sense that although you may currently be living in a world of constraints, if you were free from those constraints, you would be able to do all sorts of things. And it’s that feeling, I believe, that makes mid-teens so passionate about anime.

Wes Craven

You don’t enter the theater and pay your money to be afraid. You enter the theater and pay your money to have the fears that are already in you… dealt with and put into a narrative.

What you want to do is you want to put your audience off-balance. You have to be aware of what the audience’s expectations are, and then you have to pervert them, basically, and hit them upside the head from a direction they weren’t looking.

I think the experience of going to a theater and seeing a movie with a lot of people is still part of the transformational power of film, and it’s equivalent to the old shaman telling a story by the campfire to a bunch of people. That is a remarkable thing… If you scream and everyone else in the audience screams, you realize that your fears are not just within yourself, they’re in other people as well, and that’s strangely releasing.

Quentin Tarantino

If you’re a film fan, collecting video is sort of like marijuana. Laser discs, they’re definitely cocaine. Film prints are heroin, all right? You’re shooting smack when you start collecting film prints. So, I kinda got into it in a big way, and I’ve got a pretty nice collection I’m real proud of.

The exploitation films were made in such an artless way with these big wide shots of Sunset Boulevard or of Arcadia or downtown L.A. or wherever. In mainstream films, especially in the 1980s, the Los Angeles you saw wasn’t the real one; it was a character with this backlot sort of atmosphere. They tried to luxuriate it. In exploitation films, you see what the place really looked like, you see the bars and mom-and-pop restaurants.

I’ve had people write that I’ve seen too many movies. In what other art form would being an expert be considered a negative? If I were a poet, would I be criticized for knowing too much about Sappho? Or Aristotle?

Richard Linklater

The most unique property of cinema is how it lets you mold time, whether it’s over a long or a very brief period.

The essence of you probably doesn’t change and that’s really one of the concerns of [“Before Midnight”]. Have Celine and Jessie changed? They are still themselves; they seem very connected to the same person they were at 23 and yet life has this way of attaching things to them, whether it’s children or just life experience and responsibility. It’s a very different life at 23 where you could just get off a train with no one waiting on you back home, no schedule. When we meet them the second time they are very scheduled. He has a plane to catch, he is at work, and she is grounded in the city she lives in. So you see the reality closing in even though it’s still this romantic encounter. By the time of the third film they are in the real world, we see their social interactions and they are much more grounded.

I’ve always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you’re doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy.

James Wan

We think craft is important, and the irony has always been that horror may be disregarded by critics, but often they are the best-made movies you’re going to find in terms of craft. You can’t scare people if they see the seams.

When you’re watching an action movie, you experience an action movie more outside of the aquarium, you’re out of the aquarium looking in at all the swimming fish that are in there. Whereas horror films and thrillers are designed to put the audience into that box, into that aquarium.

Christopher Nolan

You’re never going to learn something as profoundly as when it’s purely out of curiosity.

The screen is the same size for every story. A shot of a teacup is the same size as an army coming over the hill. It’s all storytelling.

Films are subjective—what you like, what you don’t like. But the thing for me that is absolutely unifying is the idea that every time I go to the cinema and pay my money and sit down and watch a film go up on screen, I want to feel that the people who made that film think it’s the best movie in the world, that they poured everything into it and they really love it. Whether or not I agree with what they’ve done, I want that effort there—I want that sincerity. And when you don’t feel it, that’s the only time I feel like I’m wasting my time at the movies.

Todd Solondz

People have trouble understanding where I stand in relation to my characters, and very often this gets reduced to me making vicious fun of them.

[My film “Happiness” is] not for everyone and it’s not designed for everyone and I don’t think I’ll ever write anything that’s designed to appeal to everyone. If you want sympathetic characters, it’s easy enough to do: you just give someone cancer and, of course, we’ll all feel horribly sad and sorry. You make anyone a victim and people feel that way. But that’s not of interest to me as a filmmaker or as a writer. I may be accused of a certain kind of misanthropy but I think I could argue the opposite. I think that it’s only by acknowledging the flaws, the foibles, the failings and so forth of who we are that we can in fact fully embrace the all of who we are. People say I’m cruel or that the film’s cruel, but I think rather it exposes the cruelty and I think that certainly the capacity for cruelty is the most difficult, the most painful thing for any of us to acknowledge. That we are at all capable. And yet I think that it exists as much as the capacity for kindness and it’s only the best of us that are able to suppress, sublimate, re-channel and so forth these baser instincts, but I see them to some degree at play as a regular part of life in very subtle ways and not so subtle ways. I don’t think that after the seventh grade that these impulses evaporate. So, from my perspective, I’m trying to be honest with what I see and what I’ve experienced and what I believe is true to our nature.

Jeff Nichols

I feel like when you write, you have to have a personal core to a story if you have any hope of it translating to an audience. There are certain emotions you have throughout your life that are palpable, you can feel them; they hurt. Every film I’ve made, I can point to one of those emotions, and for [“Mud”] it was going to be heartbreak. I can create all these plot lines, but they have to service that… By the time you get to the end of [the film], that thematic idea has just seeped into the story. You haven’t attacked it head on; you’ve been able to let your audience absorb it into their bloodstream.

I remember I was in junior high school and I was going to write a short story about mobsters, or New York mobsters. I think I had just seen a Scorsese film. And I told my dad that. And he was like, “You haven’t ever been to New York.” And I said, “Nah, but that’s where mobsters live.” And he basically said, “Why don’t you write something about Arkansas?” And a window in my mind opened. I realized all of a sudden that I had access to something that was interesting, that the rest of the world couldn’t write about, because I was the one there.

Gaspar Noé

My characters are never heroic. They are mostly lost and trying to find the right door to open and they end up opening the wrong doors.

You wake up because you killed someone and you’re afraid of going to jail. And the moment you wake up you feel safe and it’s over and you can meet that person in the street and you’re not going to jail. The good thing about dreams is that they erase some kind of desire, because after your dreams you feel you’ve done it, and you’re relieved.

In a way, movies don’t present how sweet or normal sex can be. There were many doors open in the ’70s during the sexual revolution by many directors who were doing movies containing sex scenes that were not sex movies, as you may call them. There’s something very old fashioned in the world we live in. You can have images of cruel or mechanical sex available anywhere to young kids, but they are disconnected from real life. The presentation of love in real life is missing from the movie theaters. It’s totally a chronic nuisance. How many people get killed in movies now? Even in a general audience movie like “The Passion of the Christ”, it’s all about torture. Why can that be seen by kids, but just two grown up persons kissing and enjoying their bodies, that’s a problem?

Paul Thomas Anderson

You have to be a brat in order to carve out your parameters, and you have to be a monster to anyone who gets in your way. But sometimes it’s difficult to know when that’s necessary and when you’re just being a baby, throwing your rattle from the cage.

My filmmaking education consisted of finding out what filmmakers I liked were watching, then seeing those films. I learned the technical stuff from books and magazines, and with the new technology you can watch entire movies accompanied by audio commentary from the director. You can learn more from John Sturges’ audio track on the “Bad Day at Black Rock” laserdisc than you can in 20 years of film school.

[In film school] there was an assignment to write, you write a page that has no dialogue in it… you show a character trait through action, with no dialogue. I had read this great script by David Mamet, which was “Hoffa”… and there was a great scene where Danny DeVito is driving along… and it shows what he’s going through by the method he uses to keep himself awake while driving, which is he lights a cigarette… and he lets it burn down to his fingers to keep him awake. And it’s just so simple, and perfect, and lovely, and it’s Mr. Pulitzer Prize himself, David Mamet. So I took that page, and I handed it in. And it got a C+… There’s a wonderful thing that if you drop out quick enough, you get your tuition back.

Lars Von Trier

Political correctness kills discussion.

If you want to provoke, you should provoke someone who is stronger than you, otherwise you are misusing your power.

You can’t do much in this world without hurting someone else. Every time you take a breath it’s to the disadvantage of someone or something. And then you have to decide how and in which way you will hurt others. And I find it quite agreeable trying not to hurt anyone, but I have made this decision about the fish. It’s a pity about them, but also, if I pull up a fish, then it makes space for another fish who will be so happy to get more space. And he will become a very happy little fish. You can rationalize it in a number of different ways—maybe the fish I pull up is depressed and wants to end his life, but he hasn’t really been able to do it. It’s not easy if you’re a fish. I wouldn’t know what a big salmon who’s really tired of it all would do.